


“I’m sorry for your loss.”

by LaLopez1981



Series: 100 Ways to Say I Love You [10]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: 100 Ways to Say I Love You Writing Challenge, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Bucky Barnes Is a Good Bro, FrostIron - Freeform, M/M, Mentions of Natasha Romanov - Freeform, Minor Character Death, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, Past Relationship(s), Prompt Fill, Sif/Thor - Freeform, Writer's Block
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-19 02:43:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19347889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaLopez1981/pseuds/LaLopez1981
Summary: There has been a death in the Odinson family. While Thor is falling apart, Loki tries to keep everything running smoothly, even while holding in his emotions about the fight he’d had just days before his parent’s death.





	“I’m sorry for your loss.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, lookie, I managed to write another prompt even while trekking through Morocco with some of the most annoying twentysomethings I’ve ever met. 
> 
> To be honest I had a hard time coming up with something for this one so I borrowed (heavily-ish) from an episode of Will & Grace. Season 8, episode 20, “The Mourning Son,” to be exact. But obviously I gave it an Asgardian/FrostIron twist. 
> 
> Enjoy! xoxo

“How are they handling this?” Sif’s voice was soft as she approached Frigga, who was standing in the kitchen, watching her two grown sons as they greeted the family, friends, and strangers she wasn’t ready to face yet into the home she once shared with her husband. Her heart ached at the thought that she would be sleeping alone in their bed tonight.

“I think you know how Thor is taking it,” she murmured, the attempt of a small smile tilting up the side of her mouth.

Sif chuckled softly. “Well…he and Odin were very close.”

“They were.” Frigga felt the tears spring into her eyes and turned away to compose herself and find something to wipe them away.

Sif regretted her words but pretended not to notice Frigga’s tears. “And Loki? Is he doing okay?”

“Oh,” Frigga waved a hand as she wiped at her nose. “You know Loki. No one ever knows what’s going on in his mind.”

Sif watched as Frigga lifted her eyes then, looking at her sons again, and seeing the worry in them. Thor had told Sif just the night before about Loki and Odin’s argument in the days before he’d had the stroke that took his life. And argument that frustrated Thor because he didn’t know what it was about. Frigga was the only other one who knew and neither her nor Loki were sharing. And knowing Loki, Sif was sure he was holding in a lot of emotions at the moment. More than usual.

“Would you like something to eat, Mother Frigga? Or drink?”

“No, thank you, darling. I...”

They both looked toward the brothers again at a small commotion, and watched Loki all but shove a clearly emotional Thor toward the kitchen. The two women exchanged a look and Sif sighed.

“I’ll take care of it.”

* * *

Loki hated funerals. No. He hated small talk. He loathed funerals. Forced to make small talk with people he only saw when someone died or was getting married, and in uncomfortable dress shoes. To make things worse, his brother wouldn’t stop blubbering like a child beside him. Brought to tears with every condolence given, Thor was a sniffling mess.  
  
On top of everything else going on, Loki’s level of annoyance was skyrocketing by the second, and he was on the verge of losing it when Thor sniffed, loudly, again. “Brother, why don’t you take a break and I’ll see the rest of the guests in?”

Thor sniffled and pawed at his face, shaking his head. “Why? I’m fine. Let’s just finish.”

“You can barely hold yourself together,” Loki muttered. “Take a break, clean yourself up. You’ll have plenty of time to talk to everyone. They’re not going anywhere for awhile.”

“Mind your place, brother,” Thor grumbled. “ _I_ am the eldest son. I should be the one to greet everyone that comes to…” He paused as his voice wavered. “Pay their respects to Father.”

Loki turned to face Thor, laid a hand on his arm, gentle but firm. “Thor.” He waited for Thor to meet his eyes. “Go wash your face. You’re not making anyone feel better by greeting them red-faced and dripping like a leaky faucet.”

Thor started to argue again, but Loki simply tightened his hold and gave him a rough shove toward the hallway where one of the bathrooms were. Before Thor could retaliate, Sif appeared beside him and veered him away from Loki, murmuring to him. Meeting Loki’s gaze behind Thor’s head, Loki and Sif exchanged a look, and Loki mouthed a quiet “thank you.”

* * *

Funerals were exhausting. Emotionally, obviously, but when you were hosting the mourning parties and had to make sure the food was right and there were enough places to sit and enough to drink — alcoholic and otherwise — and enough coasters to not ruin your mother’s furniture, it added another level of exhaustion.

Loki was making tracks in his mother’s plush carpet, going from room to room, back and forth from the kitchen, making sure Frigga had eaten something — he had to force her to stuff a cupcake in her mouth, for Norns sake — and checking with Sif that Thor wasn’t on the verge of another emotional breakdown.

Loki found Thor later, sitting in the den all but holding court with a mixture of their childhood and adulthood friends. Loki had passed by a few times, heard the laughter, and the quiet moments of being overwhelmed with the idea that the large, looming father figure that was Odin Borson would no longer be a presence in their lives. Loki wasn’t in the mood to join in, but that’s exactly what Thor and Fandral and the boys they’d grown up with wanted of him when he walked in to give Sif a fresh drink.

“Loki, Thor has somehow blocked this out, so remind him. Remember his thirteenth birthday? When we all came over and stayed all night, driving Mother Frigga crazy, and we were in the big upstairs room having a shaving cream fight? And Frigga screamed for Odin and he came in all ‘what is the meaning of this?’ Do you remember that?”

Loki grinned, the corner of his mouth ticked up a couple notches but little humor to the smile. “Yes. I remember that night.” He remembered being silly enough to fall asleep first and get a cup of cold water dunked on his head. He remembered how mad both Odin and Frigga were about shaving cream everywhere.

“Why don’t I remember that?”

Loki slid his eyes over to his brother. “You don’t remember spending the next day cleaning up all that shaving cream from Mother’s wood furniture? How furious she was because some of it was stained?”

Thor nodded slowly, a smile curving his lips. “Ahh, yes. I think I do remember now.”

“Anyway, that was one of my favorite memories of Odin. What about you, Loki? You must have a treasure trove of stories.”

“Uh, no. No, I don’t. I need to get back to the kitchen.”

“Aw, go on, Loki,” Volstagg chimed in. “No one got into more trouble with Odin than _you_.”

He smiled tightly. “No, I don’t think so. But, please, you all continue.” Loki ground his teeth when someone’s hand tugged at his elbow, trying to keep him in the room. Voices grew, encouraging Loki to speak.

“Please, brother. Tell one story,” Thor asked in that brotherly tone he would take on when he wanted something of Loki.

Loki had reached his limit. “All right. You want a story? I’ll tell you a story. My father wished that I wasn’t gay.”

The room went silent. Loki heard at least one gasp. Thor’s face drained of color and Loki looked away.

“And he chose to fill me in on this information less than a week before he had a life-threatening stroke. So, now, the last memory I have of my father is that he hated everything that made me who I am. The last memory he has of me is walking away angry at him. And that is what I get to live with for the rest of _my_ life. Was that a good enough story for you?”

Before Thor, or anyone, could say a word, Loki stormed out of the room.

* * *

Frigga pushed open the door that had been left only slightly open and found her youngest son sitting in the same spot he always sat growing up — at the window overlooking the front yard, with a panoramic view of the small town he couldn’t wait to escape.

“I knew I would find you here.”

Loki stiffened then relaxed just as quickly when he realized who was speaking to him. “I wondered what took you so long.”

Frigga smiled and stepped further into the room. “It took a minute for Sif to convince Thor to tell me what happened.”

Loki shook his head as Frigga lowered to the bed that had been there since Loki was in high school. “You should be downstairs. There are people wanting to talk to you.”

“Let them wait. You need me.”

“Mother.”

“You can’t carry this on your shoulders for the rest of your life, Loki.”

He sighed. This was exactly what he’d been hoping to avoid. “How can I not? He always treated me differently than Thor. I just never imagined that was why.”

“Your father did not treat you differently than Thor.”

Loki’s eyes shot up to meet his mother’s.

“He really didn’t. He saw, from the moment we brought you home, that you were mine. You belonged to me.” His eyes softened, silently urging her to continue. “You were always more attached to me. Everyone knew it. Odin didn’t want to impede on that. Or make you uncomfortable. So he let you be with me and do the things he wasn’t interested in doing. Theatre. Ballet.”

“So, what? I’m supposed to forgive him because he allowed you to make me gay?”

Frigga scoffed and crossed her arms. “I did not _make_ you gay, young man. Really.” They shared a short, slightly tense chuckle, because they were a family that believed being gay was a genetic predisposition, much like handedness. “Loki. Your father loved you.”

He shook his head, got to his feet. “He said he wished I wasn’t gay. That’s what I am, Mother. It’s who I am. He wished I wasn’t me.”

“No,” Frigga stood and stopped his pacing, taking him by the arms. “What he wanted was for you to have an easier life. He wanted you not to make things so difficult for yourself.”

“Because I’m different! Because I’m gay!”

“No! Because you’re so angry!”

Loki froze and stared at Frigga through rapidly filling eyes. “Wha…who said…I’m not angry.”

“Resentful, then. I don’t know, Loki.” Frigga dropped her arms and stepped away. “You keep so much to yourself. You think it makes you mysterious, which perhaps works with the men you date. But once you became a teenager, your father and I struggled to understand you. We tried; we let you be when you felt we were intruding. We let you express yourself with your hair and your…piercings.”

Loki had to laugh a little at himself. He was a terrible teenager. Defiant for no reason. Doing extreme things to his hair — a whole side shaved for two full years, plus dyeing it a new color every month once he turned 14 — and piercing everything from his nose to his eyebrows to his lips. None of the family knew he’d had his navel and both nipples pierced through most of his twenties. He realized after years of therapy he was trying to get Odin’s attention. In all the wrong ways. He wondered if Frigga or Odin knew about the number of boys he would sneak into his bedroom through his last couple of years of high school. He wasn’t subtle about it, but he would often threaten Thor if he told.

“I feared when you left home that we would know even less. And I was right.”

Loki raised his shoulders. “What do you mean? You knew where I was living and going to school. You knew the majority of my friends.”

Frigga clucked her tongue. “But I didn’t know _you_ , my darling. I heard about most of the things going on with you once you started bringing Natasha and Bucky around.”

“All right, so I kept some things to myself but…I told you some things, too.”

“You didn’t tell us you wanted children.”

Loki’s brows furrowed deeply. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“What?” Frigga laughed. “Everything. You never once said you wanted to have children and all of a sudden we’re supposed to know. You threw a fit over that blanket over something —“

“Important? Whether I want children or not is not the point. It was my blanket. There was no logical reason why my baby blanket should go to Natasha just because she and Clint are expecting. Thor got his when Sif got pregnant. My blanket should’ve gone to me.”

Frigga frowned sadly at him. “All right. So what then? You’re going to be angry at your…dead father for the rest of your life? Over a blanket?”

Loki groaned in anger and frustration. “Please don’t make this seem insignificant, Mother. I am not angry about the blanket. I am upest because…I…I…”

“Why? Because we didn’t make an assumption about our one child who constantly rebuked expectations and fought tooth and nail to not be what everybody else wanted him to be?”

Worn out emotionally, Loki all but collapsed on the bed, head in his hands. “Mother, if you came up here to make me feel less guilty, you’ve failed.”

Frigga sat beside him, wrapping her arms around him as much as she could with the way they were sitting. “I don’t want you to feel guilty at all, my love. I want you to see where your father was coming from. He felt terrible about the argument. That’s why he kept calling you. He understood why you got so upset and he wanted to apologize.”

Overwhelmed now, Loki choked out a sob, and let the tears fall. He felt Frigga’s arms tighten around him and leaned into her. She turned his body, gathered him close, and cupped her hand to the back of his head.

“It hurts so much, _Mamma_.”

“I know, _elskling_.” She let him cry, to have a brief moment of letting everything go before Loki remembered himself and forced himself to stop. Sitting up, he pulled away from Frigga and mopped at his face. “Feel better?”

“Not really.”

Frigga sighed to herself.

“What?” Loki cocked a brow when Frigga lifted her eyes to his. “Do you think I don’t know a disappointed sigh when I hear one?”

A soft giggle bubbled up Frigga’s throat. “Not disappointed.”

“Then what?” Loki rubbed at his eye as he got to his feet and moved to the dresser to check his face in the mirror. He wished he knew how to rub away the ache in his chest.

”Even now, here, alone in your childhood room, you don’t want me to see you cry.”

Loki turned slowly to face his mother, the look on his face a mix of irritation and confusion. “It’s not that,” he said haltingly, as if he wasn’t sure, and frowning as if lost in thought. He knew what Frigga was thinking because he wondered the same thing: how many others had he let see him cry? He could only think of one.

Frigga chose to let the subject pass. “Your father was thrilled with the idea, you know. Of you wanting children.”

Loki’s hardened façade slipped away, his eyebrows tilting up sadly. “He was?”

Frigga let out a breath, an almost determined one, as she got to her feet. “It surprised us both that you said it.” She saw the hard frown coming back into Loki’s eyes and expression and took his hand between hers. “Not for the reason you’re thinking. Not for the reason for which you accused your father.”

Loki looked away, let his hand hang between his mother’s soft ones, the reminder of his argument with Odin making his stomach clench uncomfortably.

“You shocked us, Loki. You’ve never spoken of wanting children before. You keep that part of your life so hidden…”

“What part? What do you mean?”

“Well, darling…you must realize.” Loki’s brow ticked up a notch. “You’ve never brought anyone home to meet us. I thought when you were with the one for more than a year — the, um, the engineer?”

“Anthony,” he answered quietly.

“Yes. Natasha and Bucky both said you were very much in love.”

“We were. I was.”

“Then why did you never bring him home?”

Loki glanced at Frigga before stepping away again, grunting in exasperation. “Because.”

Frigga angled her head in the way mother’s do that says so much without her uttering a single word. And made Loki feel the need to explain.

“Mother, he’s the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. He hardly had the time for me to drag him upstate just to meet my parents.”

“If he loved you as much as your friends made me believe he did, I would think he would have made the time.”

Loki sighed in frustration, ran a hand over his face. “I never asked him to.”

“Why not?”

“Because — I don’t know. I never felt…” He raised his eyes to Frigga and shrugged weakly. “I didn’t think you and father wanted to know about that part of my life.”

Frigga pressed a hand to her chest, to her heart, and smiled sadly. “Don’t you remember how excited we were when Thor brought Sif home for the first time?”

“That was different,” Loki muttered.

“How so?”

He hesitated. “Because it was Thor.”

Frigga’s entire expression morphed in an instant from heartfelt sympathy to inconvenienced mother bear. And Loki involuntarily reared back. “Listen to me very closely, Loki Odinson, because this is the last time I am going to say it: your father and I love you and your brother equally. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“We have always loved you equally and we always —“ Frigga seemed to catch her slip and cleared her throat. “ _I_ always will.”

The serious moment lay heavy between them, broken — mercifully, to Loki — when a gurgle and then a soft cry was heard from the room next door. Thor’s old room.

“Go. Go check on your grandson.”

“Are you all right?”

Loki nodded. He was one hundred percent sure himself, but if it made his mother feel reassured. “I will be.”

Frigga smiled and reached up to kiss Loki’s cheek, cupping his other cheek and squishing him. “It sounds trite and a bit saccharine, but we have to tell the people we love that we love them, while we still can. Yes?”

Loki’s inner bitchy rebel wanted to roll his eyes, but he controlled himself and simply nodded. His nephew’s cries grew louder and more demanding and Loki urged Frigga to attend to him.

Alone, he took another moment to compose himself, finding himself questioning everything about his past relationships. Was he as closed off as his mother said? Is that what went wrong with Tony?

Not wanting to deal with the mess that was his love life at the moment, Loki took a deep breath and headed back to the gathering.

* * *

Coming down the back set of stairs that led to a hallway behind the kitchen, Loki came to a halt on the last step when he found Bucky standing there talking to Tony Stark. Dressed in one of his more expensive suits, Loki could tell, Tony saw him first and gave him a nod, prompting Bucky to turn, and Loki forced himself to smile, willing back the tears that threatened to come into his eyes.

“Hey, buddy. You been crying?” Bucky asked as he approached Loki, running a thumb down the side of his face.

Loki surprised himself by chuckling. “Yes. I have.”

“Good.” Bucky leaned in and pulled Loki into a tight hug. “S’bout time.” Loki hummed another laugh against Bucky’s shoulder and clapped his back.

“Thank you so much for wearing your best leather jacket, James,” Loki said running a hand over Bucky’s lapel.

Bucky laughed, ducking his head. “It’s black isn’t it.” They shared a laugh. “See you in there?” Bucky jerked his head toward the living room, a slight twinkle to his eye.

Loki smirked, knowing his best friend was trying to make himself scarce so he could talk to Tony alone, and nodded. And then it was just him and Tony. “Hello, Anthony.”

“Hey, Lokes.”

Loki could feel his insides melt. He found he missed Tony’s silly nicknames for him.

“Uh, look, I think I’m gonna head out.”

“Why?” Was that panic he felt skitter up his spine?

Tony pursed his lips, throwing out a hand, gesturing wildly like he always did. “I dunno,” he said on an uncharacteristic nervous laugh. “I thought you saw me earlier. I wasn’t sure if I should come and your reaction was —“

“Shocked. Gob smacked. I nearly dropped Frigga as I walked her to her seat.”

Tony dropped his hands, stuffed them into his pockets on a second thought. “Oh. Well. It was a beautiful service. I wish I’d know him. He seemed like a good guy. Definitely who you got your bitch face from.”

Loki laughed harder than he meant to and Tony all but glowed at him.

“Listen, Anthony…” Loki came down from the last step, closing the distance between him and the one he considered the love of his life. “It’s been brought to my attention that I’m not very good at sharing myself or my feelings for those I care for, and…” He stopped just feet from Tony, itching to reach out and touch him. “I want you to know that the moment I saw you in the church…well, it was the happiest I have felt in…months.”

Tony’s eyes never left Loki’s. And for some reason it was making Loki’s flesh feel warm.

“I miss you,” he confessed, meeting Tony’s gaze. “More than I thought I would, if I’m honest. I miss you in my life and my heart.” Loki felt a sense of relief, amid intense vulnerability, as he spoke.

Tony only half-grinned. And a part of Loki deflated.

“Anyway…I just wanted you to know that. I don’t mean to cause any issues. Because I know you’re seeing someone now. So…”

“Well, actually…” Tony moved even closer. “I’m not seeing anyone right now.” Loki’s heart began to race, and he had to swallow to ease his dry throat. “I miss you, too.”

This close, Loki’s eyes wandered over Tony’s face. They hadn’t seen each other in months, nearly a year, but Tony looked as handsome and stylish as ever. It pained him to even dare to hope there was a sense of reconciliation on the horizon. But when Tony reached out and slipped his hand into Loki’s, ran his thumb over his knuckles…

“I’m sorry for your loss…Loki.”

Loki’s vision blurred slightly as his eyes filled, even as his smile grew. With a quick twist of his hand, Loki interlocked his fingers with Tony’s. “Anthony…there’s someone I want you to meet.”

**Author's Note:**

> Any and all responses are always appreciated and treasured more than you know. *hugs*
> 
> ~La


End file.
